Roberto Calvi - Death

Death

On 10 June 1982, Calvi went missing from his Rome apartment, having fled the country on a false passport in the name of Gian Roberto Calvini. He had shaved off his moustache and fled initially to Venice, and from there he apparently hired a private plane to London. At 7:30 AM on Friday 18 June 1982 a postman found his body hanging from scaffolding beneath Blackfriars Bridge on the edge of the financial district of London. Calvi's clothing was stuffed with bricks, and he was carrying around $15,000 worth of cash in three different currencies.

Calvi had been a member of Licio Gelli's illegal masonic lodge, P2, and members of P2 referred to themselves as frati neri or "black friars". This has led to a suggestion in some quarters that Calvi was murdered as a masonic warning because of symbolism associated with the word "Blackfriars".

On the day before his body was found, Calvi had been stripped of his post at Banco Ambrosiano by the Bank of Italy, and his 55 year old private secretary Graziella Corrocher had jumped to her death from a fifth floor window at Banco Ambrosiano. Corrocher left behind an angry note condemning the damage that Calvi had done to the bank and its employees. Corrocher's death was ruled a suicide, although as with Calvi's death there have been suggestions of foul play.

Calvi's death was the subject of two coroner's inquests in the United Kingdom. The first recorded a verdict of suicide in July 1982. The Calvi family then secured the services of George Carman QC. At the second inquest, in July 1983, the jury recorded an open verdict, indicating that the court had been unable to determine the exact cause of death. Calvi's family maintained that his death had been a murder, and following his exhumation in December 1998, an independent forensic report published in October 2002 concluded that indeed he had been murdered, as the injuries to his neck were inconsistent with hanging, and he had not touched the bricks found in his pockets. Additionally, there was no trace of rust and paint on his shoes from the scaffolding over which he would have needed to climb in order to hang himself. When Calvi's body was found, the level of the Thames had receded with the tide, giving the scene the appearance of a suicide by hanging, but at the exact time of his death, the place on the scaffolding where the rope had been tied could have been reached by a person standing in a boat.

This aspect of Calvi's death has been the focus of the theory that he was murdered, and it is the version of events that is depicted on screen in Giuseppe Ferrara's film reconstruction of the event. In September 2003 the City of London police reopened their investigation as a murder inquiry.

Roberto Calvi's life was insured for $10 million with Unione Italiana, and attempts by his family to obtain a payout resulted in litigation (Fisher v Unione Italiana CLC 682). Following the forensic report of 2002 which established that Calvi had been murdered, the policy was finally settled, although around half of the sum was paid to creditors of the Calvi family who had incurred considerable costs during their attempts to establish that Calvi had been murdered.